The growing convergence among science, true religion, and philosophy as they seek what is irreducibly correct among different pathways to truth. Really.

22 December 2013

Earthquakes - do they occur at certain times of the day?

According to my calculations, the 6th grade means students are around
11-12 years old. If so, then the Rising Generation is full of people a
lot smarter than I was at that age. The question below from Ask-a-Geologist is just one of
many like it:

Q: Dear Geologist,

Our name is Arianah and Cray and we are sixth grade students
at Preston Middle School in fort Collins, Colorado. We are currently learning
about how the Earth’s surface changes over time. We are curious about
earthquakes. We have a couple questions for you. Is there a common time when
earthquakes happen during the day? Also, why did you become a geologist?

Yours sincerely, Arianah and Cray :D

A:

1. Earthquakes are essentially random. We understand why they happen, we understand where they happen, but we do NOT understand WHEN
they will happen. There are always
aftershocks following a main event, of course, but the main event cannot
be predicted. Extensive research has shown that there is no correlation
between earthquakes and certain times of the day or external *
events - for instance there is no
correlation with either the location of the Sun, or of the Moon, or with
tides (alignments of celestial bodies, which cause neap tides or spring
tides, is called syzygy).
Some of the brightest minds on this planet have been searching for more
than a
half century for some evidence that main event earthquakes can be
predicted, but without
success. They can be forecast #, but not predicted.

2. I was a solid-state physicist and realized that if I didn’t
do something drastic, I would be stuck inside a laboratory all my life
with
radioactive sources and high-pressure cells. This was brought very much
to my attention one day when I had a high-pressure cell blow out and
spew Cobalt-60 all over the inside of our lab, and had to call in a
special
Spill Team. Also, by this time physics as a profession was drifting into
a dead end with string
theory, and I saw relatively little value to humanity to spending
billions of dollars to see if
another exotic particle existed. I checked out breakoffs of physics,
including
astrophysics, hydro-geophysics, weather physics, and geophysics, and
found the
last one to be very exciting. It also got me out into exotic places,
like the
Venezuelan jungle, the southeastern Alaska panhandle, the Empty Quarter
of
Saudi Arabia, etc. Geoscience gives me amazing opportunities to visit
these places and many more. But even more interesting to me is to be a
detective – to be
the first to discover something beneath the ground or the seafloor. I
was the first to say where the groundwater was beneath the San Pedro
Basin in Arizona and Sonora, Mexico, and the first to map where titanium
sands lay beneath the seafloor off the coast of South Africa. That’s
ever so cool.

* It has been shown that if you inject fluids into certain
formations (e.g., deep sediments northeast of Denver, CO), you can
trigger swarms of micro-earthquakes. Basically this is the ground
shuddering to equilibrate and adjust itself to a slightly new stress
regime. However these sorts of events are so small that they are almost
never felt.They really are not earthquakes as the general public
understands earthquakes.

# A forecast: in other words, there is an X% chance
that there will be a magnitude Y event on the Z fault zone in northern
California within the next 30 years. This is very, very different from
saying that there will be a Magnitude Y event at Z location on X day -
that would be a prediction. We can't do that.